The State Board of Education’s recent rubber-stamping of Capital Prep Harbor charter school’s expansion in Bridgeport is yet another example of a common theme in education reform: trampling community will. Capital Prep, which opened in 2015 over the objection the Bridgeport’s Board of education and community members, does not reflect the community. The school serves no English Language Learners, though 15 percent of Bridgeport’s students are ELL. The school has a 37 percent out-of-school suspension rate, over twice the rate in Bridgeport’s public schools. Bridgeport’s Board of Education unanimously opposed the school’s expansion. Bridgeport already must pay several million dollars annually to charters. As the superintendent testified, the expansion will drain an additional $200,000 from Bridgeport’s budget; money it cannot afford. Last year, owing to decreased state funding, Bridgeport had to fill a $16 million budget gap. The state board ignored Bridgeport’s needs.

As recent education reform failures demonstrate, robbing local districts of decision-making power over education policies is a recipe for disaster. By contrast, reforms that emanate from the school districts themselves have shown success.

The ultimate in top-down reform for struggling districts is state takeover. Two much-hyped state takeovers occurred in Tennessee — the Achievement School District (“ASD”), and Detroit — the Educational Achievement Authority (“EAA”). After years of consistent failure, both recently closed, returning control of schools to the districts.

ASD and EAA employed reform’s “greatest hits.” Outside managers were hired to run the districts. Charter schools proliferated. They used ill-trained Teach for America recruits.

Both “reform districts” were plagued with high teacher turnover, a major factor in their failures, and rampant financial mismanagement.

State takeover made things worse for students in the ASD and EAA. In 2015, only one fourth-grader in Detroit’s EAA passed the state math test. After years of EAA control, only three of the 15 EAA schools moved off the list of the lowest 5 percent in the state. In Tennessee, the results were similar, with the ASD’s charter schools performing the worst.

After years of failure, both states admitted defeat. EAA was labeled a “train-wreck of educational policy.” Tennessee was recently ranked the worst in education, owing in large part to its severe shortage of trained teachers.

In a telling comment, one departing ASD chief, charter founder Chris Barbic, admitted that it is harder to succeed in “a zoned neighborhood school environment,” rather than when he was able to cherry-pick charter students.

Incredibly, other states replicate these failed ideas. Charter expansion, questionable teacher “licensing” and state-imposed receivers are still being pushed despite lackluster, if not failing, results.

At the same time, officials ignore the slow and steady progress made by districts that engage in home-grown educational improvement. Long Beach, California, and Union City, New Jersey, are good examples. Both districts are diverse and majority economically disadvantaged. Yet both have been able to sustain improvement by focusing on the unique needs and strengths of their communities.

As reported by journalist Jeff Bryant, Long Beach resists reform trends, instead focusing on time-tested educational policies. It increased resources in its schools. Instead of focusing on rooting out teacher incompetence, the district provides additional supports. The district forged strong relationships with local community colleges and universities. Long Beach State trains 70 percent of the district’s teachers, who student teach in the city’s schools. The district has a 92 percent teacher-retention rate. Years of focus on supporting teachers and children have paid off. The district’s graduation rate has climbed steadily, often beating the state average. District alumni who attend Long Beach City College graduate at higher rates than their classmates.

Union City, New Jersey, as chronicled in David Kirp’s book, “Improbable Scholars,” is a similar district-grown success story. The district received a sizable infusion of resources as a result of the Abbott school funding case. The money was spent on preschool, reducing class size and instructional initiatives that this majority Spanish-speaking population needed. The architect of much of the reform was a bilingual-teacher-turned-administrator who spent his career in the district. As in Long Beach, struggling teachers are provided support, rather than fired. Stability is a key to Union City’s steady progress.

In contrast to failed state takeovers, that leave children and communities behind in their wake, district-led improvement methods have staying power precisely because they use the needs of their children and communities as their starting point. It is a shame that Connecticut officials ignore our own local, well-informed voices.

Writing in the Stamford Advocate, education advocate and commentator Wendy Lecker writes, Chicago is this nation’s third largest city, and among its most segregated. Recently, several unrelated reports were released about education policy in Chicago that, together, provide a vivid picture of the divergent views policymakers of have of public education; depending on who is served.

As reported by researchers at Roosevelt University, between 2009-2015, Chicago permanently closed 125 neighborhood schools, ostensibly because of low enrollment or poor performance.

The standard Chicago used for low enrollment was 30 students to one elementary classroom — an excessively large class size, especially for disadvantaged children.

The school closures occurred disproportionately in neighborhoods serving African-American, Latino and economically disadvantaged students. Professors Jin Lee and Christopher Lubienski found that Chicago’s school closures had a markedly negative effect on accessibility to educational opportunities for these vulnerable populations. Students had to travel longer distances to new schools; often through more dangerous areas.

School closures harm entire communities. As Georgia State Law Professor Courtney Anderson found, where neighborhood schools were a hub for community activities, vacant schools become magnets for illegal activity. Moreover, buildings in disuse pose health and environmental dangers to the community. Vacant buildings depress the value of homes and businesses around them, increase insurance premiums and insurance policy cancellations. In addition, the school district must pay for maintenance of vacant buildings.

Although Chicago claimed to close schools to save money, the savings were minimal — at great cost to the communities affected.

At the same time Chicago leaders closed 125 neighborhood schools, they opened 41 selective public schools and 108 charter schools; more than they closed. Chicago charter schools underserve English Language Learners and students with disabilities, and have suspension and expulsion rates ten times greater than Chicago’s public schools. Even more astounding, despite the self-selecting and exclusive nature of charters, researcher Myron Orfield found that Chicago’s public schools outperform charters on standardized test passing and growth rates in both reading and math, and high school graduation rates.

The Roosevelt University researchers found that the expansion of Chicago charter schools devastated the public school budget, contributing to massive cuts of basic educational resources in Chicago’s public schools. Moreover, many of these new charters have remained open despite falling below the “ideal enrollment” standard used to close neighborhood public schools.

The education policies of Chicago’s leaders force its poor children and children of color to attend under-resourced schools, often at a great distance from their neighborhoods, on a pretext of under-enrollment and poor performance. Officials fail to consider the devastating effects school closures have on educational opportunities or on the health of entire communities.

Chicago promised to use the proceeds of the sales of vacant schools to improve those neighborhoods. Yet, city leaders instead used those funds for school capital projects. A WBEZ investigation found that Chicago’s new school construction and additions disproportionately benefit schools that serve white, middle class students, even though white students are far less likely to suffer overcrowded schools than Latino students, whose schools do not see the benefit of capital spending.

Often, costly new capital projects are near under-enrolled schools serving children of color. Rather than integrate the schools, or improve conditions in impoverished schools, officials spend money intended for poor neighborhoods on perpetuating racial and economic segregation.

Chicago officials claim they cannot force white students into schools with predominately poor and minority students, for fear that white affluent families will flee public schools.

Poor families and families of color can be forced to attend under-resourced public schools, often at a dangerous distance from their homes, or perhaps low-performing “no excuses” charter schools. However, the district will invest in neighborhood schools to appease white affluent families.

These divergent views of public education, investment for the white and wealthy, and “accountability” for the poor and minority, are not limited to Chicago. A recent Atlantic Magazine article chronicled the severe underfunding of East Hartford schools, where schools have to choose between a reading interventionist and an AP course, and they must photocopy textbooks because they don’t have enough. Connecticut’s wealthy towns need not make such stark choices. Nor do they have charter schools foisted upon them. Our affluent children can attend well-appointed public schools in their neighborhoods.

Segregated, unequal schools are the product of conscious policies. These policies result from a divisive vision of what some children deserve versus others. As, the philosopher John Dewey once admonished, “what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that the community must want for all its children”— not just its white and wealthy ones.

Last week, The New York Times unwittingly provided an example of how bad education policy is made. A front-page article trumpeted “Free play or flashcards? A new study nods to more rigorous preschools.”

The study the article featured purportedly proved that frequent, direct instruction of “academic” content in preschool yielded more “cognitive gains” than play-based preschool. The study even contended that preschools that do not engage in enough direct academic instruction “may be doing their young charges a disservice.” The study’s author, Bruce Fuller, denigrated play, declaring that “(s)imply dressing up like a firefighter or building an exquisite Lego edifice may not be enough.”

However, Fuller’s study did not prove that “academically oriented” preschools help children learn better.

The study showed simply that children who were exposed to instruction regarding phonics, simple writing and counting manipulatives frequently in preschool, and then were tested on these discrete skills near the beginning of kindergarten, did better on those tests than children who were not exposed at all or as frequently to this instruction.

Of course if one instructs a child on something and tests her on it soon after, she will perform better on that test than a child who did not receive that instruction.

Does this obvious observation prove that “academic” preschool helps children learn better? No — as the authors themselves admit. They state that they did not follow children in this study past kindergarten, even though they acknowledge that previous preschool studies find that many effects fade by fifth grade.

To the contrary, decades of research demonstrate that an emphasis on play in the early years provides long-lasting academic and social benefits.

Young children’s brains are not ready for the abstract thinking that direct instruction of “academic” content requires. Children use play to establish the foundation for abstract learning. For example, socio-dramatic play enables children to understand sequencing essential to math and reading. Building with blocks enables children to understand that objects can represent other objects, so later they can comprehend that lines represent letters and words represent ideas. Contrary to the claims in The New York Times article, play is learning for young children.

Play builds a strong foundation for acquiring academic skills. As I have written (http://bit.ly/1blEzTj), children who learn to read at age seven, having engaged in play-based learning before, have better comprehension in middle school than those who learned to read at five.

The Fuller study did not follow the children who engaged in more play-based activities to test them on those math and literacy concepts, once they learned them at a developmentally-appropriate age. It is entirely possible that the children in Fuller’s study who did not score well at age five on concepts to which they were not exposed in preschool would, at a later age, outscore those children from “academically-oriented” preschools; precisely because they engaged in more play-based learning in their early years.

Forcing children to engage in age-inappropriate tasks in preschool instead of play creates a stressful environment that undermines learning and social development. Children who experience the “toxic stress” associated with living in poverty need play to develop crucial executive function and self-regulation skills, and to learn to form positive relationships. A curriculum comparison study that followed children to age 23 found that, as they grew, children who had direct instruction in preschool engaged in more misconduct than those who had more play-based curricula.

The Fuller study noted in passing that preschools serving advantaged children have more play-based activities than those serving poor children. In 2014, I wrote about the detrimental effects of making kindergarten the new first grade (http://bit.ly/1blEzT). Low-income children suffered the most, enduring more age-inappropriate instruction and being starved of a rich curriculum. Now The New York Times gives top billing to an inconclusive study advocating introducing developmentally inappropriate practices even earlier.

Public funding for preschool, especially for disadvantaged students, is gaining traction nationwide. Is it coincidental that an article pushing “academic” preschool, which produces immediate quantifiable, though questionable, results, without regard to long-term effects, appears on the front page of a national newspaper now?

Policy makers force many unproven and disproven reforms on schools educating our most vulnerable. As a condition of basic funding, they demand concrete results, like standardized test scores, that are often irrelevant to important educational and life outcomes; and that often force schools to deprive poor children of the types of learning that are most important in life.

Why, when it comes to poor kids, do we not have any stake in long-term outcomes?

In a recent commentary piece in the Stamford Advocates, Education advocate and columnist Wendy Lecker provided an important analysis of the unwarranted and dangerous attack on public education that is taking place in the United States. Wendy Lecker writes;

Political theorist Benjamin Barber, who died April 24, wrote about the importance of education as a public good. “Education not only speaks to the public, it is the means by which a public is forged.”

As he noted, education transforms individuals into responsible community members, first in their classrooms and ultimately in our democracy. Local school districts are also the basic units of democratic government.

Michigan professor Marina Whitman recently noted that the essence of a public good is that it is non-excludable; i.e. all can partake, and non-rivalrous; i.e. giving one person the good does not diminish its availability to another.

Some school reforms strengthen education as a public good; such as school finance reform, which seeks to ensure that all children have adequate educational resources.

Unfortunately, the reforms pushed in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations attack education as a public good. For example, choice — charters and vouchers — is a favorite policy of all three administrations. Choice operates on the excludable premise of “saving a few.”

In operation, choice makes education rivalrous. As a New York appellate court observed, diverting funds from public schools to charters ‘benefit a select few at the expense of the ‘common schools, wherein all the children of this State may be educated.’”

The experience in America’s major cities reveals choice’s damaging results. At a recent NAACP hearing, New Orleans residents spoke of an all-charter system rife with fraud and mismanagement. The schools are highly segregated with poor children and children of color relegated to schools with limited resources, inexperienced teachers and long commutes.

Michigan’s policy of unfettered charter expansion, together with a money-follows-the-child school funding system decimated Detroit’s public schools, along with other poor districts, and has left schools across that state intensely segregated.

Chicago’s choice policies disenfranchised mostly communities of color, shuttering neighborhood schools to open charters with a history of excluding ELL students and students with disabilities and with expulsions at 10 times the rate of Chicago’s public schools.

Recent research from Roosevelt University reveals that Chicago’s policies toward charters are a major factor causing the fiscal crisis in Chicago’s public schools. Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emmanuel claimed to close neighborhood schools, in predominately poor and African-American communities, to “right-size” the district. However, he then proceeded to open a slew of charter schools in neighborhoods with declining enrollment, demonstrating that he had no interest in “right-sizing.”

The public school district, responsible for charter facilities, saw its debt burden increase markedly. A third of Chicago’s charters alone carried a debt burden of more than a quarter of a billion dollars. The charter strain, coupled with Chicago’s existing $6 billion debt, forced public schools to cut special education teachers, advanced courses, the arts, increased overcrowding and left schools without funds for basic supplies, such as toilet paper.

A new study in California similarly showed that its charter policy operates without regard to the health of the public school system. California has spent billions on charters without considering the quality of charters or the impact on host districts. The report, prepared by the organization, In the Public Interest, noted that to be eligible for school construction, a public school district must demonstrate the need for seats. However, charters have no such requirement. As a result, California has spent more than a billion dollars opening schools in areas with no need, and often opening schools that perform worse than public schools.

Connecticut’s policies regarding charters also fail to consider the impact on children in and out of charter schools. State officials turn a blind eye to segregation, exclusion and astronomical suspensions in charters. They ignore restrictions on over-saturating districts and directives to consider local opposition.

Across this country, public money is diverted from public schools to charters with no consideration of need, quality or the impact on the majority of public school students. The result is invariably the creation of exclusive schools, out of the reach of voter oversight, at the expense of public schools that serve everyone.

Charter advocates claimed charters would be superior without the constraints faced by local districts. However, after more than 20 years, charters are no better than public schools.

Moreover, they leave public schools without resources to serve the most vulnerable and communities disenfranchised by unelected school boards.

As Barber predicted, “What begins as an assault on bureaucratic rigidity becomes an assault on government and all things public … (destroying) a people’s right to govern themselves publicly … (and) to establish the conditions for the development of public citizens.” Reforms that gut public education attack democracy.

In a new piece published in the Stamford Advocate, education columnist and advocate Wendy Lecker reveals a stunning new proposal that would force taxpayers to give Connecticut’s charter schools even more scarce public funds. Governor Dannel Malloy already gives Connecticut’s charter school more than $110 million a year and this year, while proposing the deepest cuts in state history to public schools, Malloy unveiled a plan to increase that amount by about 10 percent. However, a group of Democrats in the Connecticut General Assembly want to divert even more public funds to these privately owned, but publicly funded entities.

As Wendy Lecker explains;

Using the Betsy DeVos playbook, Norwalk Sen. Bob Duff and East Hartford Representatives Jason Rojas and Jeffrey Currey are pushing major changes to Connecticut’s school funding system, concocted by the charter front group, the Connecticut School Finance Project; in order to funnel money directly from school districts to privately run charter schools.

Currently, public school districts pay for the cost of education from: a state allocation, ostensibly calculated under Connecticut’s school funding formula, the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula; local funding, i.e. the local share; and some federal funds.

Charter schools are considered independent school districts, authorized and overseen by the state. Local communities have no say over the operation of charters within their borders. Charters are exempt from many requirements, such as having all certified teachers and serving all grade levels. Thus, it is logical that districts should not pay local dollars to charters. Charters are funded through a separate state funding stream, and receive federal and private funds.

However, the Connecticut School Finance Project proposal will now have local districts paying for these privately run charters. For every child attending a charter school, a local district will lose a portion of its ECS allocation equal to about 25 percent of its local per-pupil share. Charter schools will receive an ECS allocation that will cover the rest of its funding. So charters will get more state funding than the local school district, plus local districts will now pay them an additional penalty for each charter school student. As charters expand, districts will lose more.

The DeVos team used this strategy in Michigan. They instituted a system where money intended for public schools flowed to charters. They then fought for explosive charter growth. This toxic combination decimated budgets and schools of Michigan’s poorest cities, such as Detroit.

Worse still, this proposal fails to fund Connecticut schools adequately. A foundation aid formula, like ECS, is only adequate if its components are: i.e., the foundation amount, the amount necessary to educate one child with no special needs; and the weights that adjust the foundation amount for different needs, like students living in poverty, English Language Learners and students with disabilities.

This proposal’s foundation amount is not based on any assessment of the cost of education in Connecticut. Instead the proposed foundation amount is supposedly derived from average spending in other states — a ludicrous way to estimate the cost of education here. The proposal does not even consider spending on operating expenses, i.e. the expenses needed to run a district. It only considers spending on a narrow selection of expenses they call “core instructional costs.” It is no wonder the foundation amount this group proposes is lower than Connecticut’s foundation amount back in 2007-08.

The proposed student need weights are also not based on the actual additional cost of serving needy students. The 30 percent poverty weight is less than half of what experts say is needed to educate poor students. The proposal omits additional weighting for students living in severe poverty, who are costlier to serve. Why? Because charters tend to serve students who are less poor than their host public school districts. If the formula does not differentiate, then charters are rewarded for continuing to ignore the most disadvantaged.

The proposed ELL weight is a ridiculous 10 percent — only one-tenth of what it necessary to fund education for these students. It will particularly harm districts with large and growing populations of ELL kids. However, charters routinely under-serve ELL students, so a low weight means they will not get penalized financially for continuing this practice.

This proposal removes special education funds from the ECS allocation. For a group claiming its aim is a “unified” formula for all students, why omit students with disabilities? Special education is the thorniest cost to deal with when privatizing schools. Removing it clears the way for charter expansion.

And though some districts stand to gain this year (especially Duff’s, and Rojas’ and Currey’s), the proposal reduces the state share of funding for our poorest districts.

Even proponents admit this proposal woefully underfunds Connecticut schools. The group acknowledges that the ECS formula is currently underfunded by more than $600 million. Realistic estimates conclude that the total shortfall is over $1.5 billion.

Yet this proposal plans to increase school funding by only $320 million — over six years! And there is no mechanism to increase state funding as costs rise.

Raiding public school funds to favor privately run charters, that serve less than 2 percent of Connecticut students, is not equity. It will leave our neediest students with less.

In a recent commentary piece first published in the Stamford Advocate, education funding expert Wendy Lecker laid out the problems with Governor Dannel Malloy’s recently proposed school funding system. Wendy Lecker writes.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy spouts rhetoric about the “urgency” to make progress in finding a “fair” system for funding Connecticut’s schools. Unfortunately, his 2018-19 school funding proposals will take Connecticut backward in its struggle to adequately and equitably fund education.

A brief refresher on Connecticut’s funding formula, the Education Cost Sharing Formula (“ECS”): ECS is a foundation formula similar to that of many other states. It establishes a foundation amount, the amount of money necessary to educate a child with no special needs, then adjusts for poverty by adding a certain weight to that amount, and adjusts for the number of students in a district. It then uses a measure of town wealth to determine the state and local shares of the amount for each district. While a foundation formula is inherently sound, ECS has numerous flaws. The foundation amount was never based on the actual cost of educating a child, nor does the poverty weight reflect the true added cost of educating students living in poverty. Connecticut removed the weight for English Language Learners from the formula in 2013, though there is a recognized additional cost to educate these students. There was never a weight in the formula to account for the additional cost of educating students with disabilities.

The measurement of town wealth is also skewed.

These flaws drove CCJEF, in 2005, to commission an education adequacy cost study to determine the true cost of education in Connecticut. Over the past 30 years, more than 50 cost studies have been conducted in 35 states. They have formed the basis for genuine school finance reform in many of these states. National studies show that school finance reform has had a significant positive effect on academic and life outcomes, especially for poor children.

Then-mayor Malloy was a founding member of CCJEF when it commissioned the cost study. In 2007, Malloy and the rest of the CCJEF steering committee presented their proposal for reforming Connecticut’s school finance system, based on that cost study.

What a difference 10 years and millions of dollars’ worth of donations from charter school lobbyists make. Now, Gov. Malloy rejects the notion of a cost study and instead proposes changes to ECS that not only are not supported by any evidence, but explicitly contradict reality.

According to Malloy’s OPM Secretary, Ben Barnes, cost studies are “spurious” and instead education funding should be determined by the “amount of support that the state would like to place in its K-12 system.”

In other words, education funding, according to Malloy, should be based on our leaders’ political whims rather than on what kids need.

Here are some examples of Malloy’s 2018 school funding whims, which, as CCJEF and others point out, will reduce overall k-12 funding in Connecticut.

Malloy proposes reducing the ECS foundation amount from $11,525 to $8,999 for 2018 and thereafter, while increasing per pupil funding for charter schools from $11,000 to $11,500. As CCJEF points out, in 2007-08, the ECS foundation amount was $9,687.

Since 2007-08, Connecticut has seen an increase in ELL students, students with disabilities and students living in poverty. In fact, the number of children who qualify for free (not reduced) lunch has grown 10 percentage points statewide. In some districts, the increase in need is startling. In Windham and New Britain, there was a more than 20 percent increase in students qualifying for free lunch. New mandates such as the Common Core and teacher evaluations further increase the cost of education. Yet Malloy proposes reducing foundation below the 2008 level.

Malloy proposes changing poverty measure from free and reduced priced lunch (“FRPL”) eligibility to Husky A eligibility. While FRPL is not an accurate measure of poverty, Husky A eligibility is just as bad. As CCJEF notes, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for HUSKY A, thus would not be counted. Connecticut Voices for Children calculated that 24 percent of children living in poverty do not receive HUSKY A and thus would also be excluded. Moreover, Malloy seeks to limit HUSKY A eligibility even further, purging more children from the ECS poverty measure. Worse still, Malloy proposes reducing ECS’ poverty weight from 30 percent to 20 percent, for apparently no reason at all.

These are only a few examples of the ways Gov. Malloy is seeking to restrict funding for Connecticut’s schools. To learn more, read CCJEF’s testimony at http://bit.ly/2mjdmKy and Connecticut Voices for Children’s analysis at http://bit.ly/2lHm9To.

Then call your legislators and demand that Connecticut conduct a new cost study to ensure that education funding is based on reality, not the governor’s whims.

Across the country, states are re-examining their embrace of the hastily implemented common core tests. Membership in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) has dwindled from 31 to 14 states. West Virginia is the latest state to consider dropping the test for all grades.

Last year, Connecticut convened a committee to review Connecticut’s standardized tests, the SBAC and SAT. However, the committee’s final report ignored serious validity problems and concluded Connecticut should plow ahead with these expensive and questionable standardized tests.

Connecticut’s teachers’ unions, CEA and AFT, dissented from this report, because these committee members did their homework. Their enlightening minority report is based on an examination of the evidence on the SBAC, as well as surveys of teachers, administrators, parents and students conducted across Connecticut.

The minority report highlights the evidence ignored by the Mastery Committee. It notes that experts across the country admit that computer adaptive tests such as the SBAC are “in their infancy” and their validity cannot yet be established. Compounding the validity problems is the inconsistency in computer skills among different populations in Connecticut, with poor kids at a particular disadvantage; and the inconsistency in devices used. Shockingly, the minority report emphasizes Connecticut has not proven alignment between the SBAC and our state standards. There is also no evidence that the SBAC is valid to measure student “growth.”

Administrators overwhelmingly agree that the SBAC is not user-friendly for students with disabilities or English Language Learners.

The SBAC is a bust. But, though recent federal law allows Connecticut to explore other types of assessments, Connecticut remains wedded to the SBAC.

The Mastery Committee report itself reveals the problems with the SAT. The technical report on which the committee relied to “prove” validity for use in Connecticut does not mention Connecticut once. It is worthless for determining the validity of the SAT as Connecticut’s high school accountability test. Moreover, the report the committee cited to show alignment between the SAT and Connecticut high school standards revealed only a 71-percent match to Connecticut English standards, with entire categories having no strong alignment or none whatsoever. Math had an abysmal 43 percent strong alignment between the SAT and Connecticut Standards. We know what would be in 100-alignment: a teacher’s end-of-year test and what students learned in that class. And since a high school GPA is a much stronger predictor of college success than the SAT, Connecticut would do well to explore high school tests that match what students actually learn.

But instead the Mastery Committee recommends blind adherence to the SAT.

Continuing these invalid tests comes at a steep price. As the minority report noted, 90 percent of teachers stated that testing and test prep has resulted in lost learning time and restricted access to computer labs. The impact is particularly devastating in our poorest districts. A majority of districts reported technical problems during testing, again with poorest districts suffering the most.

Contrary to Connecticut’s goals, these tests drive instruction, especially in poor schools. Disadvantaged districts are most vulnerable to sanctions such as school or district takeover based on poor test results. Thus, they have resorted to interim computerized tests for test prep. Children in Bridgeport and other districts suffer through multiple administrations of i-Ready tests and/or MAP tests, and prep for these tests. They lose additional weeks of learning time. Some of these districts have direct pressure from the state to use these tests, as their Alliance District funding depends on student improvement on these measures.

Yet, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins, there is a complete “lack of a research base on i-Ready and MAP as means for improving student learning” which they find “both surprising and disappointing given their widespread use as well as their cost.”

These same districts are deprived of proven interventions that actually help students learn. For example, the judge in the CCJEF school funding case found a lack of reading and math intervention staff throughout the CCJEF districts, as well as shortages of space, time and supplies for reading and math intervention. While districts cannot afford to provide real help for kids, they are forced to spend money and time on invalid measures of student performance.

It has been three years since Connecticut implemented the SBAC and there is still no evidence that it is valid. And Connecticut implemented the SAT knowing it was invalid for use as an accountability test. As long as our leaders keep failing to learn this expensive lesson, our neediest children will continue to pay the price.

Though the CCJEF v. Rell trial, Judge Thomas Moukawsher ruled that the Connecticut provides more than adequate school funding, his actual findings of fact, found in the Appendix to his decision, confirm CCJEF’s claims that public schools are woefully under-resourced.

The judge found that CCJEF districts had severe deficiencies in special education teachers, interventionists for reading and math, social workers, guidance counselors, school psychologists, and services for English Language Learners. Bridgeport was forced to cut 73.5 teachers, including special education teachers, social workers and psychologists in one year, even as the population grew. New Britain had to make similar cuts.

Adequate funding for all means that children who need extra support to learn get it. As the New York court said, the opportunity for an adequate education “must be placed within reach of all students.”

Moukawsher found that CCJEF districts lacked resources to provide their most vulnerable students with the extra help and support they need to access basic educational opportunities. Therefore, his conclusion that the state is providing more than adequate funding is astounding.

Because of Moukawsher’s ruling, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy felt free to cut $20 million in school aid from the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) school funding formula last week.

Districts that cannot afford teachers must scramble to fill a quarter-of-a-million-dollar hole halfway through the school year.

Simultaneously, the Malloy administration announced plans to expand publicly funded, privately managed charter schools. Austerity is only imposed on district public schools, apparently.

Compounding the damage to public school funding, Malloy’s allies intend to “reform” Connecticut’s school funding formula to drain more public dollars from public schools — toward privately run charter schools.

As the Malloy administration recently acknowledged, district public schools are the vehicle the state chose to discharge its constitutional responsibility to educate children. Although the state must ensure adequate funding, in reality the state and municipalities share the financial burden. State education funding never covers the full cost of education. The state provides a portion and the local municipality fills in the rest, with the federal government contributing a small amount. When the state fails to pay its fair share, municipalities must to make up the gap.

Successful school funding reforms start with an analysis of what it costs to educate children. Once the cost is determined, states find they must increase school spending. Those increases have been proven to improve educational and life outcomes, especially for poor children.

To begin serious reform, Connecticut must assess what it costs today to bring an adequate education within the reach of all students.

However, Malloy’s charter allies do not want to discuss the cost of education. Their agenda is to simply to get the legislature to include charter schools in any new school funding formula. Why? So local districts would be required to fund charters from local budgets.

State charter schools are considered independent districts. Local districts do not receive state allocations for students attending charter schools nor are they required pay the local contribution for children in charter schools. The host district has no say over the charter schools located within its borders. State law does require local school districts to pay for transportation and special education costs for children attending charter schools. Aside from that, charters are funded by state allocations, federal funds and private donations.

Charters are not funded like district public schools because they differ from public schools. They are statutorily created and can be discontinued anytime. They need not serve all grade levels nor provide the same services as public schools, and do not have to hire certified teachers. They are also exempt from other state mandates and accountability.

The charter lobby’s proposal would require local districts to pay for any costs for charters not covered by the state. Local taxpayers would now pay for charters like they pay for their own schools; without having any voice in charter schools and without charters following the same rules as public schools. As the state decides to expand charters, more local dollars will be drained from public schools toward these independent schools. In Rhode Island, where this system exists, districts lose tens of millions of dollars annually to charters.

Draining more money from impoverished school districts will not improve education for Connecticut’s neediest children. If our leaders are serious about school funding reform, they must start with assessing the true cost of providing every child with an adequate education. Only then can we have an honest discussion about how we can serve the educational needs of all our children.

Below is Wendy Lecker’s interview with Robert Cotto, Jr. about recent claims made by charter school advocates. It was first published in the Stamford Advocate. Robert Cotto Jr. is a veteran Hartford Board of Education member, director of Urban Initiatives at Trinity College and a doctoral student at UConn’s NEAG School of Education. He has researched Connecticut charter schools for Connecticut Voices for Children and Trinity.

Lecker: Do Connecticut charter schools outperform district schools?

Cotto: Connecticut charter schools were supposed to raise achievement, innovate, and reduce racial isolation. In terms of achievement, charter schools do not serve similar proportions of students living in poverty, bilingual children, and children with disabilities when compared to the local districts where they are located. Charter schools serve a more advantaged group of Black and Latino students in our cities. Therefore, simple comparisons of test results are like comparing “apples to oranges” and do not really tell us much about academic improvement. The state has never evaluated charter innovation. While some charters may innovate, the majority of charters operate like traditional schools. Most Connecticut charter schools are highly segregated by race (mostly Black students).

Lecker: A writer claimed that if Connecticut charters fail to perform, they are shut down, but that you cannot do that to a district school. True?

Cotto: The state almost never closes charter schools because of poor academic performance or financial mismanagement. According to State Department of Education reports, only five charter schools closed their doors since 1999. Three closed because of insufficient funds, one charter school was closed for health/safety violations, and one charter school closed because of lack of academic progress.

Between 2010-2013, all 17 charter schools in the state were renewed by the state, despite very low overall test results for some, including Stamford Academy and Trailblazers Academy. Additionally, the state did not shut down Jumoke/FUSE Academy charter school despite a massive corruption scandal that invited an FBI investigation.

On the other hand, many public schools in Connecticut have closed and been reconstituted for not meeting test score targets. At least a dozen schools in Hartford have been closed and reconstituted in the last decade.

Lecker: Can you describe what happened to Milner school in Hartford?

Cotto: In 2008, Milner school was “reconstituted” under the No Child Left Behind law for not meeting test score targets. The non-magnet/non-charter school was in one of the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in Hartford’s North End. In 2012, Milner school was selected by the Commissioner of Education for a second “turnaround” under the management of a private charter company, Jumoke/FUSE, which would be paid a management fee of around $350,000 a year. The idea was that this private charter company could do a better job operating a public school. Jumoke/FUSE hired convicted felons and engaged in financial improprieties. Academic performance of students at the school did not improve under Jumoke/FUSE. In 2014, Jumoke/FUSE ceased running Milner school and Hartford Public Schools regained control.

Lecker: Have charter schools helped Hartford public schools?

Cotto: While individual students and families may be satisfied with charter schools in Hartford, they pose more challenges for our district. The two charter schools in Hartford — Jumoke Academy and Achievement First — are separate districts not under community control. These schools serve far fewer numbers of bilingual students and children with disabilities when compared to Hartford schools only a few blocks away. As a result, they do not help Hartford Public Schools’ mandated desegregation goals. Additionally, parents have sued about and reported excessively brutal disciplinary practices at Achievement First schools. I have begun gathering stories of former charter school parents at my website, the Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project at Trinity College (http://commons.trincoll.edu/cssp/). Given the data and stories, it’s hard to tell how these charter schools help the Hartford Public Schools or the families in Hartford Public Schools.

Lecker: Can you compare charter and district school spending?

Cotto: Straight spending comparisons ignore the fact that by law, public school districts pay for all transportation and special education costs of students in charter schools. Taking into consideration these factors, Connecticut charters often spend the same or more as their host district schools on a per pupil basis.

Charter schools receive state, private and federal funds; district schools receive state, local and federal funds. Charter schools in Connecticut get a basic state per-pupil grant of $11,000, while the state allocation for districts vary. The basic per-pupil state grant for Hartford schools is around $9,500. In Stamford, the basic state per-pupil grant is around $700.

First published in the Samford Advocate, Wendy Lecker lays out the details about Secretary of Education designate Betsy DeVosas anti-public education legacy. Lecker writes;

President-elect Donald Trump selected Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos as his candidate for Secretary of Education. The DeVos nomination should alarm anyone who values public education. First, she is wholly unqualified to be Secretary of Education. She has no education degree or background, and has never worked in, attended or sent her children to public school. More worrisome, she and her husband have been on a 20-plus year crusade to eliminate public education.

Betsy DeVos freely admits that she buys political influence. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote, DeVos declared that she expects a “return on our investment” in donating to politicians. The return she seeks is the creation a conservative Christian government. For example, DeVos and her husband bankrolled the successful 2004 ballot referendum in Michigan banning gay marriage.

Among the DeVos’ long-running crusades in their quest to “christianize” America is their campaign to destroy public education. DeVos pushed Michigan’s first charter school law in 1993. As noted in a 1996 Detroit Metro Times article, while the DeVos’ ultimate aim was to abolish public education and steer public funds to parochial schools, they knew not to be blatant about that goal. Thus, they chose a vehicle that blurred the lines between public and private schools- a “gateway drug” to privatizing public education: charter schools.

As videos and documents discovered by journalists reveal, the DeVos and their allies crafted a covert strategy to privatize education. They advised focusing on “school choice” rather than mentioning “parochial schools.” They warned against having this campaign seen as a “conservative” idea, thus they sought to enlist those not on their political spectrum, especially people of color. Therefore, they suggested speaking of “choice” as the “civil rights issue” of our time. A central strategy was to relentlessly discredit public schools, linking the smear of public schools with efforts to defund them.

While the DeVos were unsuccessful in pushing school vouchers in Michigan, they were successful in creating an unregulated, wild-west charter sector in Michigan that has destabilized predominately minority school districts in the state. The DeVos’ influence in expanding charter schools, together with an inadequately-funded state school finance system in which “money follows the child” to whichever school she attends, has wreaked havoc on Michigan’s poorest cities.

Detroit is the poster child for the damage the DeVos have done to Michigan’s public schools. As Stephen Henderson of the Detroit Free Press observed, thanks to the DeVos’ efforts to block any regulation, anyone can open a charter school there without regard to quality or qualifications.

It is universally acknowledged that the explosion of charters in Detroit is a major factor in the decline of the city’s public schools. Since schools have many fixed costs, the loss of students does not automatically translate into savings commensurate with the funding schools lose. So, Detroit schools have had to respond to the hemorrhaging of funds by drastically cutting services and staff, and closing schools. And because the charters that replaced public schools are among the lowest performing in the state, children in Detroit have no good “choices.”

This past legislative session, the Devos poured $1.45 million into successfully defeating a bill that would have brought some oversight to Detroit charters.

Betsy DeVos’ nomination brings to the fore some important truths about charter schools. Charter schools are part of a larger strategy to privatize and eliminate public schools. The slogan that charters and choice are part of a “civil rights” agenda is propaganda originating from ultra-conservative white Christian activists disguising their true aims.

In reality, choice in the form of charters increases segregation and devastates community public schools in our most distressed cities. As charters have proliferated in predominately minority cities, children and parents of color bear the brunt of this destruction.

So it is mind-boggling that, in reacting to the DeVos nomination, Jennifer Alexander, head of the charter lobby ConnCAN, described DeVos as a “strong advocate for choice, particularly for our most vulnerable students … And she does seem to be a strong advocate for high standards and accountability for results.”

Seriously? DeVos intentionally decimated education for Michigan’s most vulnerable students and spent millions to block any accountability for charter schools that were abysmal failures by any standard.

Like DeVos, ConnCAN and other charter advocates have spent millions to buy political influence in Connecticut, weakening accountability for and ensuring the expansion of charters, all the while claiming they were advancing “civil rights.” So perhaps Alexander’s doublespeak praise for DeVos is fitting. They seem to be on the same team.